Yottabyte Accelerates Race to Virtual Data Center

Conventional wisdom holds that in order to build a real virtual data center you’ll need to wait for a vendor such as VMware to fill out its IT management portfolio, or upgrade to new integrated servers from Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM or Dell.

But a startup company called Yottabyte, starting today, is making the case for a software-based approach for building a virtual data center to anchor a private cloud.

The company recently released a community edition of what Duane Tursi, vice president of marketing for Yottabyte, describes as essentially being a cloud operating system. Yottabyte, says Tursi, unifies server, storage and networking compute resources under a single management framework.

The basic idea behind any virtual data center is to separate the management control plane from underlying physical resources. Once that occurs, IT organizations can more efficiently use administrators to manage multiple resources that support a specific application, versus requiring dedicated administrators for compute, storage and networking resources.

Yottabyte, says Tursi, also addresses a full range of storage management functions, including data deduplication and data protection, in addition to providing tools for managing virtual machines, managed file transfers, wide area network optimization and the setting up of a content delivery network.

Tursi says virtual data centers will ultimately drive the convergence of a raft of technologies across the data center. Rather than waiting for major vendors to get around to doing that in their own good time, Yottabyte is racing ahead to deliver on that inevitable convergence in a way that goes beyond what’s even being contemplated using immature open source frameworks such as OpenStack, says Tursi.

The way IT organizations think about how data centers are managed clearly needs to change. The pace at which that happens will vary by organization. But it looks like the race to deliver the software for managing virtual data centers, and with that private cloud computing, is definitely on.